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| Embarrassment of riches | | BOOK REVIEW |
| Rrishi Raote / New Delhi Jan 07, 2010, 00:48 IST |
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What happened when the Raj, metaphorically of course, let its hair down?” Trawling through miles of shelving in the India Office Records of the British Library in order to write a handful of books on colonial topics, Pramod Nayar found himself left with a great deal of material which didn’t fit any of his major projects but was intrinsically fascinating. Much of this, he says in the Preface to Days of the Raj, was incidental to the actual running of the empire but nevertheless provided “compelling insights into the day-to-day lives of imperial-colonial men and women”.
That covers a vast range of “personal dilemmas and professional hazards” from travel arrangements to child care, health care, kitchen management and recipes, domestic staff and their supervision, dressing correctly by rank and occasion, equipping and outfitting oneself for all purposes and climates, social encounters with Indians and other Europeans, the fascination with nautch girls and shikar, coping with boredom and homesickness, and so on.
Apart from this how-to literature, there is also travel writing, not totally alien in content even by modern standards: expressions of wonder, awe and agony, complaints and warnings, guides to various locations... .
Altogether, an embarrassment of riches.
Riches, as listed above. Embarrassment, because how to organise this deluge of snippets of information? Pramod Nayar — a lecturer in English and cultural studies at Hyderabad University with a number of books on language, history and cultural theory under his belt — takes a remarkably hands-off approach. He provides a brief and non-theoretical introduction to each section (on travel, homes, leisure and “relations”), and then lets the extracts speak for themselves.
The extracts vary in length from two lines to several pages each, and come from a variety of sources, from letters, diaries and memoirs to scholarly journals, advice books and travelogues. Given the inevitable focus on the domestic, much of the material is by women, especially that from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But the earliest source is Sir Thomas Roe, who wrote a tetchy account of his embassy to the Mughal court in the early 17th century.
Naturally, it’s almost impossible to restrain the impulse to quote. Here is a conversation, dated 1864, between “A Lady Resident” and her Indian servant:
Lady: Boy, how are master’s socks so dirty?
Servant: I take, make a strain coffee?
Lady: What, you dirty wretch, for coffee?
Servant: Yes, missis; but never take master’s clean sock. Master done use, Then I take.
But this is not typical. A more representative example, by the same “Lady Resident”: five pages on the arrangements to be made for travelling on the steamer from England to India. The list of things to purchase is enormous, yet nothing on it is non-essential. Indeed, says its author at the outset, “I shall not apologize for entering into minute particulars, as trifles on a long voyage are often of greater consequence than they appear.” The material and quantity of one’s clothes, the size of one’s luggage, the nature of one’s toiletries (soap that lathers in salty water), the furniture for one’s cabin, and so on, down to health aids, fruit, snacks and board games, all find their rightful place on the list.
Much the same situation held in upstation postings in the Indian interior, where European families had to make do with what they carried with them and what they could have sent out from England, at first, and later, from the big cities. (Yet the housekeepers all hankered after wall decorations and heavy tableware.)
There are a few surprises, from the later colonial era. Such as, how important gardening was — several pages on this, and many entries in the bibliography. The dearth of extracts on health — just three pages, though health advice does appear obliquely in other sections. (Was disease still too poorly understood in the 19th century?) The relative absence of the 1857 experience. (Editorial choice or simply irrelevance to the day-to-day matters at hand?)
So, while it is full of lively facts and stories, does this book work as a whole? Yes, because of the material; no, because of the way it is handled. Possibly the best example of a book on the intimate experience of colonialism is Charles Allen’s delightful Plain Tales from the Raj, a collection of essays which uses similar source material. Allen, as editor and essayist, had to engage intimately with every piece of text, and thus turned a sampling into a story. Nayar, letting his sources do all the talking, has not been able to do that.
A troublesome consequence of Nayar’s hands-off approach is that, because they are organised thematically, extracts from widely varying eras rub shoulders. This is ahistorical and obscures a larger story of change over time. Some extracts also deserve a paragraph or two of context, which is denied to them. Lastly, because the date is placed at the end of each extract, the reader is frequently forced to flip to the end of the passage before going back to the beginning.
DAYS OF THE RAJ
Life and Leisure in British India
Edited by Pramod K Nayar; Penguin;
XIV+310 pages; Rs 350
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